I'm 25, and I've spent more than a decade playing games of every kind. I love them as a craft. I also know the other side of them. There was a stretch where my life had shrunk to a single room: wake up, eat, play, sleep, repeat, sometimes for days at a time without going outside. I was lost, with no real income and no idea what I was meant to be doing, and the game was the one place that still felt like progress.
That's the thing a good game is frighteningly good at: making effort feel worth it, and feeling it instantly. You do the thing, and the reward lands right then, a level, a sound, a number going up. Real life works on a delay. The reading, the exercise, the saving, the practising all add up to something real, but you rarely get to feel it until much later, if you notice it at all. Games close that gap to nothing, and that's a big part of why they're so hard to step away from. They make you feel good, accomplished, part of something, straight away.
So instead of fighting that pull, I started wondering what would happen if you pointed it at the real world. That's what I'm building: an action-RPG that kids unlock by doing real-world quests, set for each child individually. Not a fixed list of chores, but whatever that particular kid keeps avoiding.
One child might happily read for hours but never go outside; another might love sport but won't go near their homework. The quest is whatever they find unglamorous, so the same pull that keeps them in the game starts working on the bit of real life they'd usually skip. Do the real thing, earn the next part of the game. They level up in the game and in real life at the same time.
I'm not a parent, and I won't pretend to be. What I can do is be honest about the psychology I'm building on, name the studies behind it, and tell you where it could backfire, even when that's inconvenient for me. That's what this blog is for.
One rule I hold myself to: every personal story here is true, and anything I'm imagining is clearly marked as hypothetical. If I wouldn't say it to your face, I won't write it to rank on Google.